The Internet is becoming a primary method for distributing media content (e.g., video and audio or audio) and other information to end users. It is currently possible to download music, video, games, and other media information to computers, cell phones, and virtually any network capable device. The percentage of people accessing the Internet for media content is growing rapidly. Audience numbers for streaming video on the web are rapidly growing, and there are a growing interest and demand for viewing video on the Internet. Streaming of data files or “streaming media” refers to technology that delivers sequential media content at a rate sufficient to present the media content to a user at the originally anticipated playback speed without significant interruption. Unlike downloaded data of a media file, streamed data may be stored in memory until the data is played back and then subsequently deleted after a specified amount of time has passed. A webcast is a media file distributed over the Internet using streaming technology to distribute a single content source to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. A webcast may either be distributed live, delayed, or on demand. Essentially, webcasting is “broadcasting” over the Internet. The term webcasting usually refers to non-interactive linear streams or events. Live webcasts enable the viewing of media content that is traditionally presented by way of conventional broadcasting (e.g., terrestrial radio and TV), but can also enable the viewing of presentations, business meetings, and seminars, for those that telecommute rather than attend. Such sites offer live broadcasting as an affordable alternative to attending physical public speaking events expanding the viewing audience to anyone that has an Internet connection. Other live webcasts may be conducted completely online independent of any offline component.
Live sporting events, such as local, national, and global events have quickly become frequent webcast subjects. Webcasting allows these events to have full audio or video coverage online. Streaming media content over the Internet has some challenges, as compared to regular broadcasts over the air, satellite, or cable. Three concerns that arise in the context of webcasting are scalability, reliability, and flexibility.
Conventionally, in order to webcast a large event, such as the Olympics, hundreds of human operators would be required to coordinate the workflow of acquiring, encoding, and publishing all of the video feeds of the events for streaming video feeds of the events over the Internet. For example, each video feed would require at least six human operators to provision the resources necessary for acquiring, encoding, and publishing, and possibly more to coordinate the starting and routing events correctly between the provisioned resources. Given the large dependencies of the workflow, one human operator may not be able to complete his or her task until receiving notification from another human operator that the corresponding dependent task has been completed. These workflow dependencies introduce a timeliness aspect to the human operators' actions.
When scaling the number of video feeds to be webcast, the number of human operators increases at least proportionally, if not greater, as the number of video feeds to be webcast increases. Also, there may be circumstances where multiple video feeds need to be started at the same moment, which may possibly require even more human operators to ensure that the multiple video feeds are all started properly according to schedule.
Regarding reliability, using human operators to coordinate the workflow is prone to human error. The reliability of any single video feed may be addressed with a team of human operators, but when scaling to multiple video feeds, the chance for detecting and remedying all human errors in a timely manner for the multiple video feeds decreases dramatically; especially when the video feeds start at the same time. Also, due to the various dependencies in the workflow, the human operators may not be able to timely perform their respective tasks in order to acquire, encoding, and publish the multiple video feeds, especially when these video feeds start at the same time. Regardless of the number of human operators used when scaling, there are too many concurrent and dependent operations to be performed in the workflow in order to ensure reliability when manually provisioning the necessary resources for multiple video feeds (as was done with the Beijing Olympic games).
Also, there are some conventional system, such as by Turner Broadcasting and Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), that have preconfigured resources, such as where the content source is mapped to the encoder, and the encoder creates content in predefined formats and publishes the encoded video to predefined locations with no flexibility. These systems do not provide flexibility to dynamically control any of content scheduling, acquisition, routing, encoding, formatting, publishing, live-to-VOD transitioning, and content synchronizing with external sources. In addition, in order to publish the video in multiple formats, one encoder per format has to be used, which is inefficient, resource intensive, very difficult to scale, and prone to errors.
In sum, the conventional systems require manual operations, which provide challenges for scaling and which are prone to error. The conventional systems also provide no control over digital video recorder (DVR) type controls, delay, and other advanced features built into adaptive HTTP streaming technologies. These conventional systems do not provide dynamic resource management, and do not provide dynamic multi-format support.